Group items tagged

Everyone has something valuable to share. We should start each day by consciously asking ourselves, “What can I do today to appreciate the gifts that others offer me?”

what unites the two of us in friendship and collaboration is not shared politics or the same religion. It is something simpler: a shared belief in compassion, in human dignity, in the intrinsic usefulness of every person to contribute positively for a better and more meaningful world.

Google’s People Operations department

there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’

As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’

Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound.

looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’’

After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams.

The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.

As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’

Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.

psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’

Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’

‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’

Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms — the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team — enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and having fun — allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized.

other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability.

it made sense that psychological safety and emotional conversations were related.

The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond.

If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?’’

to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency.

By adopting the data-driven approach of Silicon Valley, Project Aristotle has encouraged emotional conversations and discussions of norms among people who might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about how they feel.

In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

‘Just having data that proves to people that these things are worth paying attention to sometimes is the most important step in getting them to actually pay attention,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’

strategic

tactical

keep Method weird

For the weird section, we want people to share their passions.

come up with their own titles

Which of Method's values do you connect with most

I estimate that just 60 percent of candidates make it over.

"How will you make life better in the park?"

How do people feel about knowledge – is it power to be hoarded, or a gift to be shared?

The two key advantages of informal learning are that it happens at the point of need and what is learned is usually applied right away.

In the cooperative model, the learning and development group can shift from being the producer of content to being the guide, initiator, facilitator, and coach.

Based on alignment with agreed upon organizational and learning goals, the learner takes responsibility for his or her own learning – with the support and guidance of the organization.

People who are not used to working in a learning organization culture, where cooperative learning within communities of practice is the norm, need the knowhow and a new mindset regarding learning to cooperatively in the workplace.

The positive is that this incidental learning doesn’t take people away from the work. The disadvantage is that when they are so caught up in doing, people often miss an important ingredient for learning: reflection.

The combination of structured and incidental learning can give us intentional learning.

The key to solidifying this learning is reflection.

David Kolb, wrote about a model of experiential learning consisting of the following cycle: action, observation, reflection, concept formation, and back to action.

Morgan McCall and George Hollenbeck asked managers to stop once a week and answer just two simple questions, “What did you do last week?” and “What did you learn from it?” They found that this simple process of reflection enabled the managers learn from their experiences and to change the way they managed.

integration of formal and informal learning can create a virtuous cycle that leads not only to increased productivity but to the real innovation that is necessary for long term success in a dynamic marketplace.

by finally being able to see dynamic, ephemeral, local teams, we would better fight the real war for talent: not just attracting the best people, but getting from them the best that they, uniquely, have to offer.

the biggest differentiator between high- and low-performing teams: trust in the team leader.

we discovered that strong agreement with two statements from our survey, “At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me” and “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work,” corresponds with a high level of trust in the team leader. This suggests that despite the fluidity of today’s working world, the best team leaders can help each team member feel both understood and focused. Know me for my best, and then focus my work around that: These are the fundamental needs of every team member, and the foundation of any high-performing team.

frequent attention to the work of each team member is what we might call the anchor ritual of team leadership. These organizations have all instituted a simple weekly conversation between team leaders and each of their team members and have been able to measure increases in engagement as a function of the frequency of these check-ins.

The fundamental lesson of the research is that work happens on teams, whether they are overlapping, dynamic, spontaneous or designed, long-lived or short-lived. The real world of work is messy. We must push into the richness of real teams doing real work, and we must ask new questions: Do large successful teams have the same habits and rhythms as small successful teams? In how many ways do teams start? Do the best ways for team members to share information vary according to the type of team they’re on? Are some ways demonstrably better than others, in terms of their impact on team engagement? Do virtual teams adopt a cadence different from that of colocated teams?

frequency of conversations is critical

The research reveals that for people to be engaged, the span of control must allow each team leader to check-in, one on one, with each team member every week of the year. Any relayering, delayering, or org redesign that prevents such frequent attention will ultimately lead to disengagement, burnout, and turnover.

to engage your people, you should avoid mandating that they show up at the office every day, and also that all the time you spend helping your remote workers join, get to know the other members of, and feel supported by their teams will pay off in the form of more-engaged workers. Engagement is about who you work with, not where.

Employees should have more control over their work and a greater chance to do work they love. They should have the best of both worlds: one predictable, stable role with a “home team” (more often than not, the static team depicted on the org chart) and one “side hustle” — a series of opportunities to join dynamic teams inside the same organization. Their greatest value to any of these teams may well be the particular, wonderful, and weird set of strengths they possess.

Thus we should select, train, reward, and promote leaders not on the basis of an abstract list of generic leadership competencies but, rather, on their appetite for team leadership and their demonstrable track record as team leaders.

What are your priorities this week, and How can I help?

For team leaders, the emphasis needs to shift from the generic to the specific. We need to be clear that the job of a team leader is simply, and challengingly, this: to create, day in and day out, an experience on the team that allows each person to offer his or her unique best, and then to meld those contributions into something no individual could do alone. We need to anchor this job in rituals and measures, all designed to help magnify what the best teams do: the weekly check-in; frequent discussion with each person and with the team as a whole about where people can employ their strengths; and use of the eight items in our methodology to gauge progress, not for the purpose of accountability but, rather, for illumination and course correction.

nd here, finally, we see the core purpose of teams: They are the best method we humans have ever devised to make each person’s uniqueness useful. We know that the frequent use of strengths leads to high performance, and we know that strengths vary from person to person. High-functioning teams are essential to a high-functioning organization because they create more opportunities for each person to use his or her strengths by enabling the tasks at hand to be divided according to the strengths on offer. Teams make weirdness useful. They are a mechanism for integrating the needs of the individual and the needs of the organization. If we can get them right, we solve a lot of problems. Ultimately, then, to help our people become fully engaged, we need to help our team leaders see that they are our weirdness orchestrators, our quirk capturers — that theirs is the most important job in our companies, and that only they can do it.

The eight statements (taken verbatim from the ADPRI study) capture the emotional and attitudinal precursors to engagement and the productive employee behaviors that flow as a result. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. My teammates have my back. I know I will be recognized for excellent work. I have great confidence in my company’s future. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.

Barney Saltzberg’s Beautiful Oops. This short book features mistakes repackaged as something awesome! For example, a torn piece of paper becomes the smile on an alligator. Young children respond to the simplicity of the “mistakes” and the delightful revelation of the reworked mistake into something beautiful and surprising.

Modeling that it really is okay to make mistakes is vital.

I let students see me flustered and then (hopefully) recovering. I invite them to help me diagnose what went wrong, which they LOVE.

Taking public risks and making public mistakes not only helps normalize mistake making, it inspires enthusiasm for collectively problem-solving and collaborating.

Posting quotations about or pictures of mistakes can go a long way toward reminding kids that you’re serious about the value of mistakes.

Failure and discovery are so closely linked, so connected and interrelated, that it is very hard to distinguish between them, especially when failure leads directly to discovery and vice versa.

To help students understand the messy process of creation, I ask students to track their progress during any project (much more about this in chapter 6). Tracking a project’s progress helps illuminate the many mistakes along the way.

Peer-to-peer sharing also opens the door for collaboration and collective problem-solving when a student is unsure of how to move past an obstacle.

What works better than traditional homework at the elementary level is simply reading at home.